Intro
00:01
Can you feel it coming? Something's waking up inside Heart's ablaze we're standing tall Breaking chains of yesterday Dead America finds its voice in the darkness we make choice Truth and healing lead the way Hearts ablaze we're here to stay Rise from the ashes Come one day we're finding hope in disarray.
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec00:45
Today we're speaking with Tom Kubenick. He is the CEO of Securit Tactical. Tom, could you please introduce yourself and let people know just a little more about you, please?
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec00:57
Sure. Tom Kubernick, President CEO of Secure It Tactical. We are the global leader in military weapon storage, armory design. We build armories for, we do army, most of the major groups within the US DoD. We do all the SEAL teams, Special Forces units, MARSOC. That's the core of our business. In 2016 we decided to go into consumer products. Just taking you know, 20 years of military armor experience and designing a line of, you know, we'll call more intelligent firearm storage solutions for your home. We started end of 2015, took us a year, a couple years to get going but we made Inc. Magazines fastest growing companies in America in 2018 and 2021 and consumer products is now probably 80% of our business. We still, our core is, you know, we build armories for America's soldiers. We, you know, our main focus is to, is to make these guys safer and better prepared. But the retail products is, is where the company sales wise, it's just such a big market. The military is a very kind of a niche market.
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec02:11
So what got you into building these systems?
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec02:15
Well, it's, you know, I started my life off kind of turning rocks over. I was a, I did not go to college. I was a professional guitar player out of high school and I played in heavy metal bands. I played in a jazz band, I played in a dance, a big like a swing band at one point. But mainly I was heavy metal guitar player, played all over the East Coast. In 1984 Guitar Player magazine heard a demo of mine, did an article on me as the best or one of the best unknown guitar players, rock guitar players. And I packed up, moved to Hollywood really thinking my career was going to take off and played with a lot of really cool people. And I developed really bad chronic tendonitis and it ended my career really before it really got started. I was in la, I was making money, I was doing okay, but I really, you know, my plan was to get an audition with Ozzy and be that guy. And it just, yeah, it would have been, you know, that's All I did, I played 8, 10 hours a day and I overdid it actually. That's why I got tendonitis. But I had to do something. So I took a telemarketing job selling computer supplies because they would hire anybody. And I worked for this small company for a while. It was kind of a sketchy on many fronts. And a friend of mine that I'd met worked for another sales organization. He said, tom, come on over here. So I quit that job and I took a straight commission job selling computer supplies for a company. Instead of practicing guitar eight hours a day, I immersed myself in the world of sales, taught myself how to sell. It took me about two years of grinding to get decent at sales. And at that point I quit that job and I started my first business in a little apartment in Panorama City. At that time, really bad neighborhood in la, but we could afford it and started a small telemarketing company. Built that to about 20 sales reps. Sold it to a partner about 5 years later. Started a company called Greenline Data in the early 90s as a telemarketing organization. Got into the Internet in the late 90s, created tape rack.com and laptopstorage.com for your younger listeners won't know this, but it used to be that big companies computer systems had thousands to tens of thousands of backup tapes. They had to store and archive all this data. And hard drives weren't that big, so it was all going on tape. And they had these elaborate racking systems that would store and organize all your tapes. I created tape rack.com and we became one of the largest sellers of tape racks in the country. The HIPAA laws came out where all of a sudden hospitals had to lock up all the hard drives. And that came out of the blue and I created securelaptopstorage.com hospital laptopsecurity.com I had about 15 websites. Became a major player selling secure laptop storage. Secure it was originally secure it for these cabinets going into hospitals. And one day a guy called me, it was right around 2000, 2001. He's like hey Tom, can you store an MP5? And I'm like sure, what's an MP5? Now I'm thinking MP5 is a model like a little Hewlett Packard laptop or something. He goes, that's a little submachine gun. I started laughing. I'm going, who is this? He's with the FBI. And I said I'm sure we could. So we talked for about 20 minutes. I said, give me a week. I Started doing a little bit of research. I knew nothing about firearms, firearm storage. He was coming across all these references that the military was really struggling. They were Transitioning from the M16 to the M4, which is a traditional standard battle rifle, to really is a modular weapon system. And I took the. I called the company that made my laptop cabinets. I was really good friends with the owner, he was out of Canada. And I'm like, Steve, I got a crazy idea, let's make weapon racks. And he started laughing, said Tom, the Canadian government called me about two months ago. I'm already working on a design. So we shared notes and we came together with a design for weapon storage and was called the integrated weapon storage platform. It was manufactured in Canada and I became a dealer. Greenline Data was just a dealer in the US And I started really the learning curve of working with the military. I knew nothing about it, but it was a. I was just found it fascinating. And I don't have any military service, but we were involved with the Gulf War. There's a lot going on. And I just felt, know what? What can I do? What can we do to make our war fighters safer, better prepared? And we took a deep dive into the weapons storage, had some success. And in 2007, US Army Special Forces command put out a solicitation for an arms room assessment program. They wanted to hire a company to survey all their armories, tell them why they're failing and make recommendations. And you know, there was, nobody knew how to do this. This was all new stuff. So we secured a meeting with the colonel running the program. Secura at that time was a three person company. Myself and Gary, my sales guy, went down to Fort Bragg. It's my first time on a military base. And while, you know, we're on Fort Bragg, we're going into this was, I think it was third Special Forces Group. We're in their, their headquarters building, walking down the hallway to this meeting and there's all this memorabilia, all this stuff on the walls. I mean intimidating, but a really cool place too. And it just hit me out of the blue as I was walking, I walked into his office and I said, good morning sir. My name is Tom Kubernick. I'm considered the leading authority in small arm storage and armory design. I believe we're the company to do this. We sat, had a nice conversation about 20 minutes, which is a lot of time to get for the colonel and we left, got in the parking lot and Gary's like, what the hell was that? I go what? And he goes Leading authority. I started laughing like, Gary, nobody knows how to do this. There is no expert on this. We just walked in there and claimed it. We are the experts. Let's win this contract. And we got to back it up. So we, we won the contract. And for the next almost two years, I was on the road. I was at every special forces base in every single armor. I spent a day with each armor and you know, interviewing them, just sitting, watching the workflow, documenting everything. A lot of photographs, shot a lot of videos. This is stuff that civilians just, you don't get access to. And over that 18 months, you know, we prepared our report for command explaining what had happened, why their armories were failing, and made recommendations. And through that contract, I became the leading authority in small arm storage and armory design. I also designed and patented our cradle grid technology. At the time it was a secure tactical weapon storage platform. Now we simply call it cradle grid. And really what it was was replacing complexity with simplicity. You know, there my competing systems were similar. They were modular racks with different brackets for all the guns. One system had 88 different brackets. The other one had like 170. Then the other one, the last one had 230 different components. When the system is new, it works fine. The minute things start changing, well, the military just can't go out and buy new brackets easily. It's hard to buy stuff in the military. So they're using the wrong components and things slowly get worse and worse. My system was one moving part, our upper cradle. It holds everything From a smallest MP5 to shoulder launch weapon systems. It's adjustable on the fly with no tools. So an armorer can walk up to a weapon rack with Whether it's a M4, an M2 belt fed machine gun, or a crew serve gun or a sniper rifle. Walk up, move the upper cradle with one hand, put the gun in and walk away. It's all real time, very, very simple. The system never becomes obsolete. It can adapt to almost anything. The last piece of that puzzle, the rest of the system. We went to Home Depot. I called it Home Depot development. My system's non proprietary, meaning you can go in any hardware store in the world and buy gear that will go into my racks to store, to store your gear, bins, trays. Because in the military and now we're finding in civilian world, the guns are easy. It's all the gear and the amount of gear that's coming into the civilian market, it's, it mirrors. The military went through this 15 years ago, but we're seeing it now. And everybody has optics in the hunting world. There's a lot more electronic equipment coming into the space and there's just myself, I'm, I've been hunting, I'm an avid hunter. I've been hunting for the last 12 years, roughly 12, 15 years. And I find myself. The amount of gear and just in the last 10 years is. It's amazing how much stuff there is out there and it's, it's all pretty good. I say that I don't shoot more bucks now than I did 10 years ago, but I sure have here to do it. But that's the, the lightning round of kind of how I got where I was going. I was, I, I never owned a firearm until 2008. I didn't grow up. I mean I could, I used to shoot. I had family members that were hunt. I just, I grew up in a family that just wasn't hunting. They weren't a gun family? No, no. They weren't against it. I just didn't, wasn't exposed to it. Once I started getting involved I really got excited about it. When we went into consumer products I really said, you know what, if we're going to do this I've, I've got to really understand this. So I did a lot of training. I've trained with some of the best guys in the country. I spent a lot of time on you know, Gunsight Academy. I work with Mickey Shook with the site the guys down New Orleans. It's gun talk. That's Kyle, the Kyle. But so I've trained with the best of the best whenever I can to be as proficient and as you know, as good as I can get in this industry. I love the long range shoot. I'm a, I'm still not a great handgun shooter but that's. Nobody is. It's hard to be a gun shooter. Yeah.
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec12:27
It's truly about training. You know Tom, the more you train the more motor memory you get and then you can just go and do and it, it really takes over in a time of crisis. And a lot of people don't shoot enough.
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec12:46
No, it's, I don't and I, I look at that the way when I was a musician I, I literally I played eight to ten hours a day. If I had to go to a family party I'd set my alarm at four in the morning to get in my minimum of four hours. But you practice and you building that muscle memory so you walk up on whether you're nervous. It doesn't matter what happens. You can play the Part and in firearms it's critical because what people don't you never realize the state you're going to be in when you need to defend yourself. It's easy in a range, it's like going to a golf course on the driving range it's easy to hit golf balls, play a tough match and it's hard to win. And it's that same thing of how do you get yourself into such an excited state so you can rehearse under stress. And in fact we did secure we hosted a training event at Summit Point with Gary Melton and Paramount Tactical. And part of the event was a live fire force on force in a shoot house and we were simulating home invasion and then active shooter in our office. And I'm up on the catwalk and we're, you know, we're watching and you know these are all people who are in the firearms industry. They're all pretty trained, they know their stuff. And what we found when we got people into fight or flight where they were really jacked up and like, you know somebody's in the house going to try to kill them, you got to defend your, they couldn't open the safes. And what we realized, and I've been aware of this, when you're in fight or flight you lose muscle memory or you lose fine motor skills. You develop tunnel vision. All your brain power goes down to your limbic brain or the brain, the very back of your lower brain and that's instinct and you rely on that for fight or flight behavior. And I'm watching people and they're laughing because they can't get their fingers to do the little buttons on the lock. And they know the shooter's coming and they're all laughing and busting each other's chops. And I'm up in this catwalk looking at this going holy cow. And it just occurred to me our whole industry is wrong in the sense of home defense. I got back to the office and two days later I had the drawings done for what we we call HSFA locking high stress fast access locking. Four months later it was incorporated into every product that we make. And basically what it is, it's a simpler larger button lock. It's just as secure. It's all the same stuff. It's just the user interface is designed so that if you're in a true high stress fight or flight you can still operate this lock very, very effectively. We believe every gun in America should be properly locked. And with a proper fast access safe I can demonstrate it's fat. I can get to my guns faster locked in my safe than anybody can to a gun in a drawer or hidden in a closet. I'm going to be faster because I practice and I'm really good at it. And then with our system of smaller modular safes, I have firearms secured in my home. You would never know I own a gun. Yet I'm never really. At the most, I'm three and a half seconds from being armed. And that's a whole process that secure it, that we help people with is it's called decentralized storage. Or if you're going to secure firearms in your home, do it in a manner that gives you a tactical advantage and it's just a better way to do it.
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec16:14
Yeah, that was on my list to talk about was decentralized storage. You know, most people, they have a area and they store their weapon arsenals there. And myself, I. I do a couple places, but all of my munition, you know, all my casings that I use, they are in one place. And that's because I like to keep bullets in a fireproof environment. You know, just something my mind tells me to do. So when you talk about decentralized storage, I think it's a good idea to have a weapon close to you at all times in your home, because you never know in this day and age what could happen. So could you talk to us about how that is accomplished without buying a bunch of safes?
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec17:19
Well, it's, it's you. You end up buying a bunch of safes. But that's, that's, but that's, that's how we're different. We don't make great big monster safes that hold 60 guns. They actually only hold 15, but they're going to tell you 60. We make small, lightweight modular safes for the purpose of decentralizing. And it just makes more sense. It's. It's crazy. You know, there's. There's this thing. You go into a safe store, a big safe dealer, and they always tell you, buy the biggest safe you can afford. You'll grow into it. We're like, that's just stupid. Buy what you need. When you get more guns, buy another one. And this idea of these great big heavy safes, you have to put them in a basement, you have to put them in a den. I mean, you've got ads and magazines showing a pool table, a river rock fireplace, beautiful view out the window. A huge safe with, you know, it's all in burgundy with this wild west lettering on it. The Ad reads, you know, family heirloom, heritage, Americana. And I'm looking at this going, you're putting a safe in a public area of your home. Are you freaking nuts? Every single person that comes into your house knows you have guns and they know where they are. I can open your safe and remove a gun in 18 seconds. I don't care what brand you have. I know nothing about locks. I simply do know that you buy a $79 skill saw, circular saw at Home Depot and a carbide blade, it's used for cutting rebar the blades, about 20 bucks. And it's used for cutting up the half inch rebar on cement jobs. Put that blade and that saw, I can cut the side of your safe open as fast as I can cut 3/4 inch plywood. I simply go, I cut a square hole. The hole takes me about 10 seconds. It takes me another eight to 10 seconds to punch through the drywall and remove firearms. And it's, and you know, it doesn't matter what safe you have, I don't care. And whether you have bolts, corner bolts, plates, all the crap, all the security they put on the door, I'm going to open the side. And that's when you look at how safes are opened. When you look at actual crime data, safes are breached with a saw. They're not pried open. Let's go back to the original question though, decentralized storage. Because a couple important points, and we did a lot of research on crime data. A thief breaks into your home, it's going to happen between 11:30 and 1:30 in the afternoon. They're in and out of your house in about nine minutes. Yep. And they're going to break into your home. They're going to go to your master bed, the bathroom, master bathroom, master bedroom and closet, home, office, den, dining room, and they're gone. That's, that's what happens. And they're looking for prescription drugs, then valuables, and they work through the house and electronics and then silver. They want something of value before they leave. But time is their enemy. They need to move quick in and out. So when you look at firearm storage or valuables, master bedroom is the least secure room in your home. If you, you know, if you're a woman or you've got a wife that's got a lot of jewelry or you've got a nice watch collection, storing it in the cl, Your master bedroom closet, if you're, if, if you want to make it safe is the worst location. So for firearms, master bedroom, one Gun in a small fast access safe. No more than that, you don't need it. Next I look at the kitchen. Kitchen is probably the most secure room in your home. Thieves don't want your food. It's just, they're not, they're not going in the kitchens. So. But it's also when you look at people in a home, the kitchen is a room that we spend most of our time in. Kitchen and dentist. That's where the two rooms are most used rooms in a home. So I have, in my pantry I have a six gun fast access safe. It's called an agile. In that safe I've got part of my collection but I have one AR15 that's racked, ready to roll. It is a fully operable, it's ready to go close quarters optic on it. That is a home defense gun. I have very fast access. I also have an exit point to the home so I can get out. Then the closet by your front door. Thieves for the most part ignore closets. They're not interested in coats. So that closet becomes a great location. Again, I have a larger gun collection. I have a six gun cabinet, small, it's in that closet. I've got some hunting rifles and things in there. But I also have a pump shotgun. It's a little Mossberg and another AR15. Somebody comes to my front door, I'm not going to open the door and they want to get cute. I'm armed in a couple of seconds and that's, that's how the process works. But we don't. Buying a huge safe and putting all your guns in makes no sense. If a thief breaks into your home, typically thief, they're in and out in nine minutes. But if they're a little more professional, they've done more research and they know maybe you're going to be gone for a week, maybe you're on vacation and they know that or they've got time, they're going to find your valuables. So if you've got one big gun safe, well they're going to find it and they're going to open it and they're going to remove and steal all your guns. When you decentralize, they're eventually going to find one of your safes and they'll probably get it open and they're going to take the. But once they have something of value, thieves leave. They don't come back. They won. So when you decentralize your storage, you're dropping your risk profile. If you've got, you know, I've got My fast boxes, a two gun vertical safe up to my agile six gun safe. I've got those mixed out through my, out my house. I probably have 35 to 40 guns in my house just as part of my collection. The most anybody would ever get would be six because once they found a safe, if they got it open, they'd leave with that or they'd leave with the two best guns out of the same. They're going to carry so much stuff. They don't want to be too obvious. But that's kind of the methodology that we look at with handgun storage. You know, small fast X safe next to your bed, small fast access safe in your kitchen, maybe one in the den. Most people don't carry when they're home, but that's kind of how we look at it.
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec23:26
So with your safes, you, you say they're lightweight and they, they don't use the cement for fireproofing.
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec23:39
Well, I, I do. We'll talk, I mean I can talk about it. We don't use drywall, which is what the industry uses. There's only two companies that I know of that use cement. Us and amsec. Amsec makes their BF series of safes. We make the true fire safe. They're double walled steel filled with a concrete composite. That is your 1800 pound monster. It does give you some fire protection and the Amsec safe is a brilliant safe as well. I think our cradle grid interior is superior to their traditional interior, but they make a very nice safe. But when you go to all your other brands, any safe that's using drywall and carpeting, the fire rating is 100% nonsense. It is completely fake. It is, it's the biggest scam in the world is fire ratings and gun safes talk to any firefighter. Do guns survive fires? They do not in our tests and we've not been scientific about it, but we've cooked off some safes. A 90 minute safe went 12 minutes. Now our fire only got to 900 degrees. A fire in a house can go to 2000 degrees. So the safe, my estimate for most of your fire rated safes is three minutes before the, before your guns, your guns are done. That's how fast it is. And the difference, so people can understand this because once you get the analogy, you realize what you're up against. If you're making a pizza in your home, this is a great analogy. So you're going to bake a pizza, preheat your oven to 450, 500 degrees for a frozen pizza, you open the door, you can put your hand in that 500 degree oven. Hold it still, don't move it, hold it very still. You can have your hand in that oven for minutes before it eventually heats up and you've got to pull it out because static air transfers heat very slowly. Picture a small jet engine mounted to a workbench. The engine is running, the exhaust gas is coming out at 60 miles an hour at the same 500 degrees. Put your hand in that exhaust stream and they will amputate your hand in less than a second. You're going to lose every bit of skin and muscle and tendon on your hand in less than a second. Because convective air transfers heat so, so quickly. So you look at a gun safe in a home that fires in a home are moving in excess of 60 miles an hour. The air temperatures can exceed 2,000 degrees. The test that they use is a baking test. When you we took our true safe to a test facility, had it tested, they take the safe, they put it in an oven, they put temperature probes in it, they bring the temperature up they to 1300 degrees and they all sit around and wait. When the safe hits 350 degrees the test is over. That's your rating. That has nothing to do with what a fire rating is though. That is a bake rating. And all these 1 hour 45 minute safes, I'm sorry, it's complete non complete BS. In a real fire they're going to go 3 to 5 minutes. And the other side of it is if your guns are involved in a fire you shouldn't shoot them anyways. You know, that's why you have insurance. You don't know how hot your guns got. We, we've got a video out, we cooked off a Liberty 90 minute safe and went 12 minutes. At 12 minutes it was pushing 400 degrees. We're like wow, we're really surprised and so great. So we put the fire out and we were grilling I think some Italian sausage. We're out, we've got a hunting ranch we were out at, had it all set up and we're just kicking back, cameras are still rolling. I walked back over about 20 minutes later and and the safe was 720 degrees inside because the metal had continued to push heat in. The significance of this because the guns any, I mean if you've got chassis guns or metal like ARS or any like I shoot a lot of long range like masterpiece arms and things at those temperatures the guns are going to look fine but hardened Steel changes properties at 380 degrees. Annealed steel, that's a trigger group, that's your bolt group. Annealed steel, which is your barrel, changes properties at 680 degrees. And Annealed steel, when they anneal it, it's a process of softening the metal. Barrels are, they feel hard, but there's actually a lot of flex to a barrel and it needs to be. If your barrel heats up in a fire to, you know, 700 degrees and cools off maybe too quickly, well, now you've got a pipe bomb, it's going to crack, it's going to break. There's, there's just so much that can go wrong. So the idea that you want to get something to protect your guns in a fire is people have been educated that that's important. It's not buy good insurance because in a hot fire, if you, if you truly have a really hot fire, it's not going to work. You look at the California wildfires that did so much devastation. There were no safe stuff. There were no safes even standing. They all melted. I mean, it's just, you can't, you can't stop fire with metal and drywall. You just can't do it. The only thing you're going to stop it with is cement. And all fire true fire rated safes are, it's a cement composite. It's actually a little lighter than straight cement. There's some other, you know, goes in. It almost has a consistency of oatmeal. It's got mica, it's got a bunch of stuff in it. But I don't believe, I don't have a fire safe in my home. I don't, I don't. The other thing to look at is the risk of fire in America is unbelievably low and it's getting lower every year. When you look at its insurance industry is where all the data comes from. And the bulk of all fires, I think it's around 88%. It's just under 90% of all fires. The fire is contained to a pot on the stove or within the oven. The insurance claim was for smoke damage and we look at actual insurance claims for fire, the 90% is smoke damage. Open flame heat damage in a home is unbelievably rare. When it does occur, it's typically confined to one room. If you've got a professional firefighting force in the city or town you live in, they're going to be to your residence in probably less than three minutes. I have a volunteer firefighting force. I live in a tiny town, kind of out in the boonies. And response time is still 12 minutes. It's pretty quick for a volunteer firefighting force. So you got to look at risk and the risk of your house burning to the ground is tiny. But if it did happen, the safe's not going to help you. Even our true fire safe, which, our test, our safe went 2 hours and 20 minutes. Now our safe was sitting in a truck outside. It's a heavy beast of a safe and the truck was in the sun. When we put our safe into the oven for the test, it was 90, just, it was like 98 degrees, it was just under 100 degrees, sitting in a hot truck. And the guys are like, look, you're supposed to start this test at 72 degrees. I said, look, it's going to take two days for this safe to cool down to 72 degrees. I go, we don't have time. Let's run the test, see what we get. And it went two hours and 20 minutes at 99 degrees. So I'm sure the safe would go three and a half hours in an oven test. What does that mean? Well, in your home it's probably a 20 minute safe. You know, at the, at the most, I can't, I mean that, that's, again, that's, we don't, we don't, we don't do the fire rating like that. With our safe, we simply provide a spreadsheet and a graph showing the data of the performance. This is what our safe did in the industry's fire test. You want to Compare? Liberty's went 145 minutes. Ours went 2 hours and 20 minutes. Does that mean you got 2 hours and 20 minutes of protection? No, it does not. But you have more than three minutes.
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec31:36
The big thing that concerns me with storage is the ammunition, you know, because if, if it goes through a fire and it might be a low risk, but you do have projectiles going off because of the heat and whatnot. So what do you recommend there?
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec31:59
Only, Only if you put your ammo. Well, ammo's ammo. You can throw a box of 9 mil into a fire and stand next to it and it's going to crackle and pop and they're going to explode, but you're not going to get ballistic levels of speed. It's like firecrackers going off without a barrel to get the force. It's going to just, it's going to be, it can safely burn off. The problems arise when people put ammo into non vented containers. The worst thing I could tell anybody is to take a gun safe and fill it with ammo. You have now made a pipe bomb and we do, I do ammunition storage in the military and everything we do is heavily vented explosive ordnance storage. I've done some work in that. And these are big magazines for holding like, like big time explosives. It's all about venting the blast so the energy can get out of the box and down so the box doesn't blow up. Liberty makes an ammo. It's called the ammo can or the ammo. It's. They took a safe, they lined it with drywall, put shelves in it and say that's for your ammo. Why would you put drywall? Why do you want a slow heating? If you're storing ammo in a fire, you want the ammo to heat up as quickly as possible so the outer rounds pop and crackle and burn and the fire slowly goes in and it burns off at a safe rate. When you've got like a safe with drywall filled with ammo, what happens is the ammo is heating up in that safe, but it's doing it at a more tempered rate. So the outer ammo is reaching critical mass while the inner ammo is getting darn close to it. And what happens is you end up with a thousand of those rounds are all unstable at the same time. The minute one round goes it, they all go. And now that safe is a pipe bomb. And it's, it's a big pipe bomb. We've demonstrated it and we're actually going to do. We've got a ammo storage system that's marketed that we're going to cook off. I'm hoping to do it this fall, if not in the spring, out a property to show people. It'll be a spectacular video because it's one heck of a boom and it'll surprise people how big the explosion can be if you've got that kind of ammo. So if you're storing ammo, we have ammo cabinets that are, they're all punched door, diamond punched, exposed. You just need it to be vented. You need it to be open, not in a, enclosed. And there's no reason to lock ammo in a, in a, in a safe type environment. I keep my ammo in my garage in a cabinet with a punched steel door. And you know it's safe. It's, it's, I keep it outside the house. I keep, I mean, I keep my small quantities of ammo all Secure at safes, with the exception of our true safe are vented. So our, our, our agile model 52, which is possibly now the number one safe sold in America, we've now eclipsed 100,000 units sold. And we're a tiny company and you know, Liberty and Canon, they're much bigger than we are, but they make 400 different models and they change them every two years. The Agile's been on the market now for seven years. So I don't think, I don't think anybody else has sold one safe over a hundred thousand models. I mean that's, it's nuance. It might be bs, I don't know. But that little Agile system, which is a modular, you buy the cabinets all bolt together so you can make a huge system or you can separate it, but they are all vented in the back so that you can do ammunition, you can do anything you want in them.
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec35:30
That's, that's good to know. Actually. You know, the, that's the one thing that's made my mind tick for a long time about my ammunition is, well, how should I really properly store this? Because I, I've had hunter safety back in the 70s, you know, and I've, I've been around weapons all my life, but I never really dug into how to store ammunition. Which is very interesting how you put that. I'm glad that we discussed that.
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec36:08
Yeah. It's the other thing people should realize, okay, if ammo's in a fire, you throw it away. If your ammo is in a fire, you're not going to use it because the ballistics of the ammo can change and you don't know what the pressure, especially if you're like, I shoot some pretty long range, you know, 65 PRC 300 wind mag. I don't want a hot load going through that gun because it's going to blow. I mean, there's enough documented cases of barrels blowing up in people's faces. So it's. Yeah, if your ammo's in a fire, throw it away.
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec36:42
That's a good point. I like that. So you were talking about the system for the armory where they can, it's modular in design where they can just slide with a hand and one hand using the gun. Is all of your safes designed in that sort of a easy reduce configuration system?
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec37:16
Yeah, yeah. The cradle grid system is used in every single product we make with the exception of some of our handgun safes. But yeah, and it's. The upper cradle is a, it's a, you know, it's an injection molded piece, it's made in Connecticut and it's the back of this of the cabinet has louvers on it. It's just again it's very, very simple. This is not complex. We supply directions, you really don't need them. It's pretty intuitive. But when you walk into secure it, the first thing you'll see on the wall is innovate and simplify. Anybody can solve a problem with complexity. But the, you know, the genius of Steve Jobs was like with the iPhone and the iPad was a simplicity. There's no direct, there's no instruction manual. I got one for my mom. She was in her, in her late 70s. Like how do you, I go, mom, just touch it, turn it on, just use it, just play with it. Came back a few days later and she was fully just, just doing all her stuff on it. And that's, you know, that's, we take that especially with the military, you've got to have simple solutions that don't require directions because nobody wants to train, nobody wants to learn how to do stuff. They want to do stuff. So our system is extremely simple. Then the rest of it is just more about creativity because it's all the gear. There's so much you can do with our system and you can reconfigure our system at any time so you can, you know, people build racks, they get our system, they send us a photograph and a month later they completely redo it a different way. And they're like, hey, check this out. The third group, special forces at Bragg calls our system the LEGO rack because they start at the bottom. They just build marsoc, the Marine Corps out at Pendleton, they call it the Tetris rack for the same reason. They just start at the bottom with the brackets, components and slowly just max out each cabinet. Our military cabinets are, they're 84 inches high, 3ft wide. They're big. We sell them to consumers who if they want them, it's mainly a military product, but it gives them a lot of room to really dial in their storage and do exactly what they need.
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec39:19
And those are armory systems, correct?
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec39:22
Yeah, it's, I mean the only difference with our military product, it's a little bigger. The doors are perfed in the front. They've got a perf diamond pattern so that an armor can walk through the armory without opening the racks. Do a visual inventory because that's, I mean they have to do site counts daily and sometimes they're required to open the door, sometimes they're not. So we just, we Tried to make the system as best we could. I mean, it's not, it's not wide open. It's still a little. You can be challenged to see inside of them, but we also do that. So if they want to store ammunition with their guns, like special forces guys are allowed so many pounds of ammo in their armory. So all of our cabinets are vented just to. To avoid any of the other regulations that you can get into as far as explosive storage.
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec40:11
So, Tom, I wanted to talk a little bit about your philosophy. Question everything. Build better solutions and never settle for good enough. I like that a lot. Could you talk to us a little bit about that philosophy?
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec40:27
Well, it's. I look at it, you know, for us, it comes down to my personal view of things. I'm a big believer in efficiency and just doing, you know, simple solutions that are easy to do are the ones that we all stay with. I always say, you know, if you got a junk drawer in your kitchen, you open that drawer. Almost any kitchen, you're going to find a pair of pliers, maybe some zip ties, duct tape. You're going to find the simplest tools because you can solve the most problems with those. And that's when I look at our storage solutions. It's the same thing. How do we make this? How do we make it simple? And the cradle grid system, you know, after, after looking at what the military was using, I went back in the shop with a. I mean, with a piece of wood and started carving and cutting and working on this, creating the upper cradle. And I made it out of wood to say, what can I do? Okay, I gotta hold a.50 cal machine gun. I had a replica of most of the big guns. I had I replicas. I said, okay, well this works Now H. And I just worked through it. Took me a couple of months of just playing and doing stuff. I came up with the design, said, okay, this holds every single gun. Okay, great. Now what else? You know, that's. What else can it do? Okay, well, the M4 is the most popular gun that holds it. But if I put two notches here, it can hold the mag well. And now you've got 12 inches of space behind the gun to store more gear. Oh, that's interesting. Let's add that. Oh, and if we do this, I started looking at things we could do to manipulate the space, just basically to give an armor or to give a civilian more freedom to use the space the way they want. So, you know, it's. It's hard to put sometimes into words how it all works. But all of us do things as efficiently as we can. And we all have tool systems. All things that we buy and use that we end up using differently than they were intended because for us it's more efficient or it's simpler to use this this way. And I try to look at that when we're designing products saying, you know, this isn't about me saying, this is how you use a gun. This like a traditional gun safe, only works one way. Get those little W's cut in, they hold the barrels, the guns go in. If your gun's too short, well, it's got to lean in the back. If you got optics really banging into each, all this stuff and they've never changed it because nobody in that industry has ever walked in and said, how do we keep the guns from hitting each other? They don't care. You know, they're making metal boxes, they just don't care. Our, you know, we came into the consumer space after, you know, many, many years in the military space. We just bring a different mindset. But it's, you know, all of us, I think especially nowadays with AI and tech and everything. As you get closer to the retirement ages and looking at those phases of your life, simplicity becomes a big thing. And the happiest days are sometimes, are the days when it's just, you know, simple. Nice sunshine, great view, maybe a good cigar. I don't know. Just with epicurean pleasure. The simple, simple things in life. So that's, that's kind of what we're trying to do is remove the tech, remove all the craziness and just intuitive, simple work.
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec43:51
So what drives you in life? I, I know you're a musician, you like land speed records. Could you talk to us a little bit about that? Because I, I really identify with that a lot too. What was it like to do something like that?
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec44:14
Well, I, I look at life as we've got one shot. We're, we're going to make one pass. Maybe we come back and we can do life many times. I don't know. But I'm always trying to figure out how do I get more, how do I make, how do I get the most out of each day? And I, you know, I don't watch tv, I don't. There's a lot of stuff. I don't read much. I'm always doing stuff I've got. I wake up in the morning, I'm in a shop, I'm either working on an old car or I'm at my hunting property on a Tractor. I'm always doing something. And so for me it's about building memories. You know, you can, you can make all the money in the world running successful businesses and. But if you're not building good memories, what's, what's, what's the point? So, you know, this whole Bonneville thing came up. I've got, I've got an old Elmquist Saber I found in a field for 800. It's a pretty special little car. There's only four of them that we know of. And I had it restored and I started doing the restoration, got in over my head, sent it to a shop. John Pasucci did the work and the car ended up winning an award at Amelia island, which is the number two car show in the world. It's a pretty, it's a pretty spectacular little car. I, I was able to procure a second body for a second Saber because of the success of the first one for not much money. And I was down in Florida with John, I said, what are we gonna do with this thing? And he said, let's go to Bonneville. And it just, it triggered because when I was a kid I remember watching ABC's Wide World of Sports and they would cover Bonneville speed week once in a while. And I grew up in a non car family. I was the only, I was a gearhead, but I was the only one in my family just looking at that, going, what do you have to do in life to do something this cool? So we had the opportunity, said let's do it. Took us two years to build the car and what we did is the Sabre is a tiny, tiny, it's a 86 inch wheelbase car. This is a tiny car. This is way smaller than a Volkswagen Bug. And the class we went after was class J, which is the smallest engine they run, which is a 750cc motor. So nobody's run this class since the 50s because they don't make cars with engines this small. And we had this tiny saber body and we, we got two Suzuki GSX 750 motors built and we had Carpenter racing built them. They build the racing bikes like for the big whatever, you know, the big road racing motorcycle, mma, whatever it's called. They build the engines for those guys and I got two of the engines and we took a turbo system, a heltech efi. It took, it was supposed to be a one year project, took us two years. It had to be rear wheel drive because of the class of a sports car, getting a front engine, motorcycle engine and that little Transmission to hook up to a drive shaft to a rear end. Took us months and probably 40,000, $50,000 in engineering work to get that to work. It was really really hard. It's really hard to do. But we got the record was 113 miles an hour. Keep in mind how small this engine is. It's half the size of an old Volkswagen engine. It's tiny. And we our first beat of the record was 131. And then we kept tuning. We set a new record at 131 and we ran 161. Top speed was 172. And nobody's ever seen a 750cc car go anywhere near that. On that last run I hit the rev limiter at 1.5 miles. I've got three miles. We re geared the car and made some and changed the turbo springs up the boost a little bit and didn't realize how much we turned it on. And going to the taller gears made changes. So I was at the Rev Limiter 172 halfway through my run. Had we geared the car lower we would have done 200. So we're going back next year. I'm, we're taking, we're scanning the car, digitally scanning the car right now and we're going to do a digital wind tunnel. It actually works better than a real wind tunnel. Did a lot of research. So we're going to go into a computer modeled wind tunnel and start looking at okay at 220. What happens if there's a 10 mile an hour gust of side wind of crosswind? What are the, you know, what are the things that are happening? Our car is very light. Our car is 1400 pounds. Most 200 mile an hour and up cars, they add a thousand pounds of weight to them to make them stable. Our motor is so small it's hard to accelerate a lot of weight. So we're going to do some work on ground four and some we're limited with the rules in what we can do but we do have a wing on the back. We do have, you know, skirts on the side and an air dam. So we're going to go through and clean it up. And the next year the goal is to be. I'd like to break 220. Once you're over 200 miles an hour you get a red hat which is arbitrary, silly. But there's far fewer red hats in the world than there are people who have climbed Mount Everest. So that's going to be the, the call it. Remember David Letterman had stupid human tricks this is stupid human goal. It's kind of pointless. But there's something about being out there in the salt. Yeah, it was. It was not what I expected. It was much harder. We spent a week out there and we went through a lot to get that car to go. But it's just. It's one of the best weeks I've ever had. Just my son and I and we had our crew out there and we just had a great time.
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec49:49
So how did that little tiny car actually handle on the salt flats doing that 170.
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec49:59
You know, when we were running the. Running the one we're around 100, 110, we're slowly building our speed up. Everything is fine. That run right out 172. Now my head was pinned to the roll cage because my head's. I'm out of the car. It's an open roadster and I've got a roll cage like a dragster around me. So my helmet was pinned to the roll cage and the vibration on my helmet made it so I couldn't read the dash. I knew. I said, holy cow, we are moving. And there's a point where I no longer. You're driving. But I knew any input on the steering wheel, we would have spun. So I'm like, I just let it run, let it run. So the car's tracking. I'm slowly working my way to the right side of the track. I'm saying, come on, honey, come on back. Come on. I'm just kind of leaning on the wheel. I don't want to really steer it much. And I got it back towards center line. And you know, people do spin on the salt. I've got a parachute. If I start spinning, I pull the chute and it straightens the car out. You stop. But it's not about driving. To get really fast, you have to let the car run. Let, let. Let it do its thing. I have a lot of wheel to wheel road racing experience. I drove SCCA, an RX7 in the 90s racing. So I've got a lot of road race experience. But this was. This was really different. And the whole vibe out there is very much old Americana. You've got a lot of old 1920s and 30s roadsters have heavily modified. You've got belly tankers, which is the old. The gas tanks from the World War II bombers and fighters. They take those, those belly tanks and make cars out of them for Bonneville. And so the whole, the whole feel out there is all very much 1950s feel. And our car, we painted it Gold with black. I mean, it looks very, very period correct. It's a 1956 body. So it was. It was like going back in time. It was. It was really something.
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec51:56
Yeah. So another thing that I captured out of you is just do it. You know, you've got to have the ability to just experiment and really find out who and what you are. So that fear factor, how do you step through that and just let it go?
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec52:26
The greatest days of your life are the ones when you work through your fears. There's nothing. There's no greater feeling than. I was not afraid, the land speed thing. My fear was doing something wrong, damaging the car because I have a whole team that's worked two years. That really was my fear was about doing it right and safely. I wasn't worried about being hurt because I knew the. I know the math of this thing and this thing felt good. But I used to rock climb and I was rock climbing and ice climbing back in the 80s and 90s and my business partner was a girl. Her boyfriend's Kevin Thaw. He was one of Great Britain's top mountaineers. He's climbed every mountain in the world. He's amazing guy. I got to climb with him. Which got me into things way beyond what I normally would do. So he and I did the north face of Mount Athabasca. It was 2,000ft of ice on this ice wall. And we're climbing, we're simulc. Climbing up ropes, all this stuff. We're working our way up. Well, he tops out and I'm coming up and I get to the top of the ice and I've got a rock comes out over my head about halfway to my head, then loops up around. It's like a shelf that I've got to go around. Kevin's topped out and walked off to the right where the very top of the mountain is. The rope we had was about 150ft. The wind's blowing hard. He can't hear me. But since he's walked at an angle to the side, if I fall, I'm going to swing about 75 yards into a wall of rock and I'll be. I'll hit that hard enough to be seriously hurt. And I'm going to be hanging with an ice cornice, the ropes coming over the cornice and me dangling there. He would have to deadlift me up over that cornice, which you can deadlift the body with. Set up a belay system. That's not that hard to do. Getting somebody over a cornice, your body catches on it you can't really do it. So I'm sitting there going, you know, I gotta get over this ledge. If I fall, I am not going to survive. So then all of a. My brain's going, you know, the first thing is, how did I get here? What. What life choices did I make to put myself. We had just bought our first house, my wife and I have any kids yet. Things are. Have businesses going. And all of a sudden I started, started this fear started coming in and I just, I sat there for a moment and a voice in the back of my head, it wasn't my voice, it was so clear. It just said, it's worth it. Just like that. Just, it's worth it. It's never happened to me before in my life. And I stopped for a moment. I have a. This was back in the day of film cameras. I have a little Minolta film camera that I would carry with me because I could operate it with one hand. I reached into my breast pocket on my jacket, pulled the camera out, opened it up with my one finger, held it over my shoulder, snapped two photographs of this incredible view. Put it back in my pocket, reach the axe up over my head, slid it on the stone and snow till it caught on something. I'm not a little chip. Let go with the other hand. Now I'm committed. Put that hand up over my head as I walked up with my feet. I'm cantilevered on this ledge. Pulling harder and harder on these axes. This because you're actually pulling more than your body weight as you're trying to because of the leverage. And I pulled myself up and walked up. I never told Kevin what happened, that I never told him. But that's the last time in my life I've ever been afraid. And it's just, I don't care anymore. It's. You know, my wife was worried about me doing this thing. But you know what? My house is in order and I'm not going to end up in a hospital bed in a nursing home. I'm just not. And I have no death wish. I don't, I don't. But you know, I'm a pilot, I fly, I race cars. I'm going to get back into vintage racing, which I think far more scary. Far scarier than land speed records is. Wheel to wheel on a track at 105 miles an hour with a car right next to you is way scarier than, than land speed stuff. But I just look at it as we've got one path or one timeline on this planet and Everything we do is about building memories. The more memories you build, the slower time goes. Like if you sit, if you play video games. And I've done this, I'm not a video game guy. My kids, my two boys got in the World of Tanks and I got playing World of Tanks. This is years ago. So we play, we platoon and play World of Tanks together. Well, we sit down on a Saturday morning in the winter, it's snowing. We start playing World of Tanks on our computers. We're yelling at each other, talking, we're playing as a team. Six hours goes by and it feels like just an hour. All of a sudden it's like, holy crap, kids, it's four o', clock, we didn't have lunch. And you realize in those kids that play computer games all day, you're taking a whole day and compressing it into about 15 seconds of memories because you remember that you played the game. But there's not much else versus getting outside, going for a hike on a new trail in the wilderness and seeing you want to build real memories. And I can't slow down time, but I can add more to each minute. That's kind of my approach to life. I typically am up at 4:30 in the morning. I'll make a cup of coffee. I do some, some basic reading, I do a basic workout and some health stuff. And then I'll either go up to my hunting ranch and walks, work on some trails, maybe on a tractor. I'll go down the shop. If I'm working on a car, I'll just, I'm just always doing something that when you complete it, you have something to show for it. You're doing something that ends up with a result as opposed to computer games. You can play them for your whole life. You never produce a result. There's no win. I mean, all it does is occupy your time. I told my wife, I said, honey, computer games, it's like smoking pot. Five hours goes by, nothing got done. It doesn't matter the same thing. But. So that's my philosophy is just I don't get people sitting and watching TV every night. Sitting, watching sports on tv. I tried to watch a Bills game. I'm from outside of Buffalo. About a quarter into it, I'm just like, why am I watching these guys have all this fun? It just, I don't get it. I don't, doesn't make a lot. If it's educated, I'll watch some educational stuff. I like to learn how to do stuff. I spent a lot of time with YouTube you know, learning how to do learn. I taught myself welding, all these different things, so I love learning new things. But. And you don't need to go. You don't need to go to college to be successful. We don't secure. It does not require a college degree to work here. I mean, we had an ad for a marketing director years ago, and I had my senior team. They're like, all this stuff in the ad, it says, you know, bachelor's, boom, boom, you know, master's preferred. I'm saying, why are we asking for that? What do you mean? Why are you asking for a bachelor's or even master's degree? We want somebody that. I said, why? Well, because. And I just kept saying, well, why. Why do you want that drill? It just, you know, you get five wise, you get to the room, and finally they're like, tom, what? I said last time I looked, I owned the damn place. I said, look, guys, I didn't go to college last time I looked. I own the place. We don't ask. It doesn't matter. I. I would rather have somebody who got four years in the military and maybe some. If it's a boy, a guy, some. Some scouting experience. If it's level of independent thinking and military experience, I'll take that over college all day, any day. We have a list of colleges that we will not hire from. I don't. I don't want the baggage. I don't want what these colleges are teaching kids. It's just. It's. I don't want it. I don't want the baggage. So in America, kids are waking up to a horrible reality because there's a lot more people like me now. They're looking at what's happening in these college campuses who are like, we want no part of. Again, I got to turn a profit. I got a business to run. I don't give a damn about your political views. I don't. I don't care when you're here. You know, we're here to do a job, and our job is to improve the safety of Americans and improve the safety of our war fighters. That's it. And that's. If you don't.
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec61:06
That lacks in America today. You know, just the ability to let people be. And it's. It's alarming in many ways. You know, growing up, we all have some sort of mentorship going on, somebody that inspires us and helps us grow in the direction that we want to seek to develop in. What was some of your role models? Did you follow certain types of people and what helped you grow in that direction?
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec61:48
You know, it's, it's. I thought about this a while ago. I was, I had a similar question I didn't really have an answer for. And as a kid growing up, I used to sit at the adult table at Thanksgiving. Not because I thought I wanted to be an adult, I just liked listening to the conversation. I thought it was not even what they were saying, how they communicate. I thought it was kind of fascinating. But I was as a musician, I had other, you know, guitar players I listened to a lot. But in business, my first job in telemarketing, I was so bad that the guy moved me to a non sales position. The guy was horrible at it, but I worked hard and he liked me so he moved me to a non sales position. But he's the first one that he gave me a book, the Magic of Thinking Big. It was a short book and I read it and it's the first time I ever read anything that basically suggested you don't have to be who you are, you can become anything you want to be. And there's actually a series of steps. There's a process to do this and that. I mean the guy who gave me that was a coke addict and a scammer and he had a lot of flaws. But that, that exchange got me on the path of self improvement that I've followed my whole life. My next boss was Rick Rusin who really taught me how to sell it coast to coast. And he and I never had a great relationship. I had a ton of respect for him, but I owe him a lot. I mean, I look back now, I owe a lot of my success just, just to watching how he operated and watching how he ran his business. So it's. I don't have a lot of direct type stuff, but it's. You see things you like in people and you just try to mimic. You try to say what's he doing? Why is this? Why is, why does it work so good for him? What's he doing? I try to figure out, okay, I can incorporate some of that into my life. And it really comes down to this. The key to success, I think in, in for me running a business is embrace the failure and encourage your employees to embrace it. It's, we have a whole thing here is fail fast. Is like I fail every day. But you know what, I think faster than anybody else and I recognize it and I learn from it and I course correct and that's, you know, everybody that works at this company. If you Got a problem? You can come to me with any problem. Before I give you my opinion, I'm going to say, what do you think I should do? What do you think you should do? Most of the time I'm saying that sounds good. Do it, which is more of a confidence thing. Or we'll share some ideas. But embrace failure. I mean, never stop moving and embrace failure. Because people who are afraid to fail will never, ever succeed. It just. You're going to have a miserable life if you're afraid to fail. Because nobody, nobody screws up more stuff than I do in this company. And it's a known thing. And I just ice and I've got a lot of play. Play areas we'll call digital play areas where I'm working on web designs that aren't live yet because, hey guys, what do you think? They run the test at all? We're just, I'm always tinkering with stuff, trying to improve stuff and. But that's okay. You know what? I don't have to be right. I just have to recognize when I'm wrong and correct and I'm going to get there. And it's. I always tell, I tell my new people that are coming into the company. I said, look, you're driving down the road. You've got, you've got directions that aren't the best. You're driving on the road at 60 miles an hour and there's a fork in the road. Two choices. You can go right, you can go left, or you can stop and figure it out. The guy that stops will always be in last place. If you go left and you're correct, you're miles down the road. If you go right and you realize you're wrong, we make a right hand, a left hand turn. You get back on track. The guy that stopped to figure it out will never catch you. So it's, you know, move, make decisions quickly. You know, that's another. People will wait on a decision forever. And I tell this, I guess it works for me is they've got some decision coming up. I said, well, is there anything else that we can do to get more information? Well, not really. Then make the decision. What do you want to do? Well, no, stop. Just pick one. Okay, do it. Just. It's got to be that fast. It's, the faster you make decisions, the faster you move forward. Right or wrong, you'll know it and you'll correct it. But was it analysis is analysis or paralysis by analysis, whatever that term is. We move real fast here. Sometimes we move Too fast and it catches us. But that's okay. You can always slow down. But of course.
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec66:52
Correct.
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec66:54
Absolutely. But yeah.
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec66:56
So that's kind of like Thomas Edison.
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec67:01
Nobody failed as much as Thomas Edison.
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec67:04
That's. That's right.
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec67:05
You.
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec67:06
You gotta do it. And it's okay if you fail. You never know that failure might end up being somebody else's next invention. So what. What hits, hits. And if it sticks, that's really the key, isn't Is.
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec67:25
And it's. You don't want to have an ego that requires you to win. I don't need to win. I just need to move forward. And, you know, we don't have a lot of major victories in this company. We got a whole bunch. You know, you win. You win the war by hitting singles, not by hitting home runs. And we're just, you know, a lot of little things keep happening, and we're slowly. There's still so much about what we do that I don't know. I mean, we're building a company, and we're at a level now out of, you know, the sales volume and the size of the company. I'm completely. Uncharted waters. I've never run a company this big. And, you know, my. I spent years running a $2 million a year business, and now, you know, we're way bigger than that. And. But that's okay. And I'll tell my employees, say, guys, look, let's go with. Let's. Let's go with this. I'm not sure if it's right or not, but I think it's. I think it sounds like a solid idea. Let's see what happens. And I think the people that work here really appreciate the fact that. That we're all in this together and we don't always have the answers, but we will confidently, boldly go to the next level and find out when we get there.
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec68:40
That's success, you know, to define it. That's success. So is there anything else, Tom, that you want to talk about before we leave today?
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec68:52
You know, it's. There's so much craziness in the world right now. It's. I. I look at the, you know, between. AI complexity. I bought a brand new F150 Tremor pickup truck one month ago. I drove it home 23 miles. It was towed to the dealer the following morning, and they've had it ever since. I'm over a month at the dealership. They still do not know why you cannot turn the truck on. The security system has locked it out, and they can't get past it so that Ford is basically going to be buying the vehicle from me and we're working through that now I'm going to be getting a new truck. But this is it's complexity and complexity is what's killing the auto industry. It's going to kill Mercedes, BMW. I was a big BMW guy. I've had, I've owned Mercedes. Their cars are so complex now and it's not the right kind of complexity. It's. It's going to kill them all. Electric cars will eventually take over. And what's going to happen though the electric is simplicity. A motor is one moving one to two moving parts. It's too new. As the cost of electric is amortized the development costs are spending billions. You know the first CD player was $1200. Five years later they were 999. And the same thing's going to happen electric cars. And I'm hoping that some new companies will come along that embrace the simplicity of what that could be A very simple. Is that a gas pedal and a brake blinkers and it goes. And I look at life like that is what can we do? You know my goal is to live the simplest life. What I love to do does not require a lot decent set of tools, a nice shop and in a view that's my wife and I have determined we live on a lake right now it's a beautiful mountain lake and it's a big house. My kids are gone so we're looking at downsizing and we both agree I could live in a 1200 square foot house as long as I've got a nice view and I've got my shop and that's. And I'm tinkering work and building stuff. The my next project. So I've had tendonitis. I've ended my music career and I've had it my whole life and it's like it's come and gone and this I've been battling with it. It got really bad three years ago. I'm an avid golfer and I didn't play golf for three years and I was getting very frustrated because I couldn't drive at one point I was really having a hard time. I actually took a deep dive research into tendonitis and I developed my own device for treating it which absolutely worked. And I started using my device in six weeks I was pain free. A year later I'm now playing golf, I'm playing guitar again. I'm doing everything again and for the most part my tendinitis is gone. So I'M getting a patent. I talked to my patent. I got a patent pending on the device. I've got prototypes being made right now, and I'm going to market that with a video series to treat. To teach people how to treat tendonitis. Because the medical community is wrong. They treat chronic and acute tendinitis the same way. If you've got chronic tendinitis, it's a completely different. The problem is not the tendons, it's the muscles in your arm. And until you treat them, it's. It's never going to go away. So I kind of got lucky and figured this thing out out of just desperation. And my next big project is going to be, you know, there's a. A million new cases of tendinitis every year in America. If I can come up with a product, I don't need to make money at this one. I'm. Financially, I'm okay. I don't. I'm. Again, I don't live an extravagant life, but that's my next big project for a win. I'd like to. If. If this thing really works and, and I could help a couple thousand people out of the. Because if, if. Unless you've. If you've had tendonitis in your elbows, bad, it is truly debilitating. Every night you wake up in pain, you just can't sleep, you can't. So many simple things. And what's funny now is my tendonitis doesn't bother me at all until I do tiny. Like I was tying fishing line onto a hook using fine motor skills, just delicate work. And my tendons all of a sudden, like, holy crap. If I reach my hand into a bag, oh, I got cat food. I reach into a bag of cat food and pull out the beans by hand, trying to make a fist around them. My tendonitis flares up. Weird things cause it to flare up. But day to day, I'm working out every day. I'm playing golf, I'm doing all. Playing guitar and all the stuff I used to do. So if I can solve that problem and get it out there, I'm going to piss off a lot of doctors. But I don't care. That's. That's my next big project.
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec73:44
Right on that. That's exciting, actually, that, that would help a lot of people. So, Tom, how can people reach out to you and get a hold of you and get involved with you and find your products?
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec74:02
I'm. If you just Google my name. If you Google my name, Google. Secure it. Just secure it. We come right up secure@gun storage.com. we're all over the Internet, all over social media. I'm in LinkedIn. I'm in. I've got a. I don't spend a lot of time on social media, but I have a decent presence, we'll put it that way. But love to hear from people. If you're looking at firearm storage, I mean, we. We make. I love what we do, and I think it's a better. A better way to do it, and it's affordable. But, yeah, people come to the website. If you have questions, I'm. My contact information is on the website. I always want to consider myself one of the most accessible CEOs in America. If you want to just. If you want to call and ask for Tom, you will get to me. Unless I'm in a meeting. I talk to customers all the time, and the best thing I can do is talk to people about my company and hear from people about my company. So I try to make myself as. In an industry where you don't even know the name of the president of Liberty or Canon or Stack and all these companies, because in the firearms industry, the CEOs are. They're all hidden. Nobody wants to be known as a CEO in the firearms industry. And I take it very. I'm just like, no, I want to be the most accessible guy. I want to be the guy that anybody can pick up the phone. You got a question about how my product works, call me. You know, that's. We're just trying to be as. I think so. I think that this whole hiding in the corners is just stupid.
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec75:34
Yeah. Well, the world's become funny in the last few years, and people like you, Tom, you're. You're setting a shift, you know, and giving a new direction and hope. We touched a little bit on it during our conversation. People look and watch, and if they see something good, they want to start emulating it. And I appreciate what you're doing out there, because people are watching and they. They will take a look at that. Tom, thank you so much for being here today and sharing on the podcast with us.
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec76:15
Well, thank you. Yeah, it's been. It's been a lot of fun. This will. This will be a. This will be a good one to listen to. I'm anxious to hear it come out.
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec76:22
I've been chasing something bigger than myself.
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec76:26
Breaking through the walls I built Every.
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec76:30
Boundary just another there I don't play it safe I never will they said slow down, stay in line But I was bail for breaking time Metal ribs to military gray? Mountain peaks to market trade Time breaks, rules and spear records? Safety built with rebel metal effort. Always. I take the pieces no one thought would fit? Turn the chaos into something real? What looks impossible from where you stand? Is just another hill for me to climb? They said slow down, know your place? But I was made to win this race? Metal ribs to military grade? Mountain peaks to my? Time breaks, rules and speed records? Safety filled with rebel methods? Always. I'm the reckless, I'm just fearless? Every risk is calculated? Freedom makes the thunder with precision? That's the only way I'm living? Metal rifts to military grade? Mountain peaks to market trade tall breaks rules and spear records? Safety filled with travel? Memphis.
IntroEd WattersTom Kubiniec79:00
Always.